


the place you fight cruelty

by Vorpal_Sword



Series: the soft animal of your body [1]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Damien Moreau is his own warning, Episode: s03e15 The Big Bang Job, Minor Alec Hardison/Parker, Non Consensual Daemon Touching, Pre-OT3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 10:41:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20487560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vorpal_Sword/pseuds/Vorpal_Sword
Summary: The Leverage team tries to take down Damien Moreau--but there's a lot that they, and their daemons, aren't saying.Or, The Big Bang Job, with daemons.





	1. Alec and Leia, in the hotel

**Author's Note:**

> “Seems to me-" Lee said, feeling for the words, "seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed."  
~ Phillip Pullman, His Dark Materials.
> 
> I adapted a significant amount of dialogue directly from the episode. If you recognize it, it's not mine.
> 
> This is the first in the series based on writing order, set at the end of the third season of Leverage. If you want to read chronologically instead, start with "nothing on earth can silence," which is about the daemons settling, and takes place long before the Leverage crew meets each other. There is a list of all the fics in chronological order on the series page.

Alec walks around the corner, one hand on the food cart and the other rapidly scrolling through the building’s blueprints on his phone. “Only way in is the service elevator,” he says. “I’ll be the middleman, and you’ll be—” he stops abruptly when Leia, clinging to his shoulder, pokes him. She holds a paw over her whiskered mouth, looking intently forward. Alec follows her gaze. 

In front of them, Eliot crouches down, whispering harshly to his daemon. Alec has seen the wolfdog’s furious snarl many times—anger seems to be Eliot and Boudicca’s ground state of being sometimes— but he’s never seen it directed at _ Eliot _before. The pair has always seemed utterly united in purpose. Unlike Alec and Leia, who talk and bicker constantly, Eliot and Boudicca rarely even speak to each other, at least not where anyone else could see. The only time he’s ever seen them so much as disagree had been in the woods fleeing that militia, Eliot ready to throw them all on the train, when Boudicca, Leia, and Hardison had to convince him to go back for the bomb. It is not a reassuring comparison, and Alec fidgets uneasily. “Y’all done?” he asks. “We gotta go.” 

Eliot and Boudicca exchange one long, tense look before Eliot’s shoulders slump. “Fine,” he snarls, standing up and turning to Alec. “Let’s _ go _.” 

Alec looks at Leia, hoping for an explanation, but she is focused entirely on Boudicca and the sharp angle of her ears, her tail held so still it has to be a deliberate effort. “Later,” Leia says, resting her own striped tail around the back of Alec’s neck. “Be French now,” and Alec launches into his prepared spiel. 

“And who are you?” the guard asks, his porcupine daemon twitching restlessly at his side.

“Me?” Eliot says, and there is something so unfamiliar in his tone and stance that Alec nearly breaks character to stare at him. “Me? I’m Eliot Spencer.” 

The porcupine instantly bristles. Both guard and daemon stare at Eliot, then turn in unison to stare at Boudicca, who lifts a dripping lip to reveal a single fang in what is nearly a smirk. Alec has never seen her look more wolf-like. Thankfully, no one is paying any attention to him anymore, or they never would have missed Leia’s involuntary shudder. 

(It is only later that it occurs to them that _ Eliot _would never miss a tell like that, even if the baddies did). 

They’re _ in, _ they’d made it in, they are ushered into an elevator, Alec should be relieved that the plan is working, but now there is a whole new variable he hadn’t known to plan for, he’d thought Eliot was a _ constant _ yet here he is giving out his actual _ name _ and Alec is not so caught up in his own terror that he has failed to notice how terrified these goons are of Eliot. 

“Trust Eliot,” Leia whispers in his ear. “Eliot always has reasons and he always protects us.” 

“Right, right,” Alec mutters, though all he wants is to pin his partner to the wall and demand answers. 

There are so many _ guns_, and every one of them pointed at Eliot, Eliot who walks with strength, not even looking around, though if Alec knows him at all he was tallying guns in his head. Though, Alec thinks again in increasingly panic, it seems more and more likely that he _ doesn’t _ know Eliot at all. Because it is now obvious that these people _ do _know Eliot, especially the tall British man getting all up in Eliot’s space. Chapman. Alec remembers him from his research. He’d had to watch half a season of Batman: The Animated Series just to clear some of those images from his mind.

A tug on his ear redirects his attention to Boudicca. Chapman’s daemon, a black-backed jackal, is trying to get the wolfdog’s attention, to menace her, but she shrugs him off like a mosquito rather than thirty pounds of vicious predator known for going after larger species. Her entire focus is on a door at the back of the room. 

The door opens. Steam pours out. And there he is.

“Well, that’s no way to treat old friends,” drawls Damien Moreau, more terrifying in a bathrobe than any of his minions in suits with guns cocked. “Boudicca, what a pleasure.”

Alec is handcuffed to a chair before he could even process the familiarity with which the Big Bad spoke to _ another man’s daemon. _ To _ Eliot’s _ daemon. And not the way Parker sometimes talks to other people’s daemons, like she doesn’t even register the difference between the human-shape or the animal-shape, but like he has the _ right _to chat with Eliot’s soul. 

“You work alone,” Moreau says, pouring himself some whiskey. He settles himself lazily on a chair, the tiger a silent presence beside him. 

“Things change.” Only Leia’s reassuring presence on his lap keeps Alec from jumping at the unexpected female drawl. Eliot hasn’t answered. 

Boudicca has. 

Moreau nods, satisfied, and addresses the rest of his comments to Eliot. Every line emphasizes his familiarity with the hitter. Damien Moreau doesn’t just know Eliot. He knows him _ intimately. _Alec can count on one hand the number of times Boudicca has spoken directly to him, and every one of those times had been to give or receive information on the job while Eliot was occupied with fighting. 

Alec tries to focus on upholding part of his con, but he can’t help watching the tiger watching Boudicca. He’s watched enough Animal Planet to be expecting an attack at any moment. But the pounce, when it comes, comes from Moreau, not the tiger, and it isn’t Eliot he leaps at. 

Alec and Leia fall backwards into the pool, and everything else goes silent.


	2. Sophie and Melpomene, in the park

No one looks twice at a beautiful woman with a songbird daemon— at least, not in suspicion. Sophie takes advantage of that all the time. It generally helps to be underestimated, to be thought harmless or fragile, and Melpomene is more than capable of the beady-eyed glances to complement her Ice Queen characters, when necessary. Back in Milan, when Nate was first chasing her, he had given Mel a sharp look, and Sophie (or, well, Diana, at the time) had felt _seen_.

It was an alarming sensation for a grifter whose life depended on a series of masks, but she could not deny the thrill of, for once, not being underestimated.

When she had met the rest of the team, back outside Bering Aerospace, Eliot Spencer had glanced at the pair just long enough to grunt, “Mockingbird, huh?” and she had known that this was a man to watch.

Now, on a bench in D.C., Sophie knows there is trouble as soon as the boys arrive. Hardison and Leia are both hissing, and flinch away every time Eliot glances in their direction. But it is Boudicca who is most concerning.

Sophie had concluded by the end of their third job together that Eliot Spencer loathed himself, threw himself into danger because he thought his life was only valuable if it protected the team. It was obvious from the space between Eliot and his daemon, how they rarely touched or spoke, how Boudicca had held herself apart from the team and only recently started permitting Leia and Parker’s daemon to touch her. Both wolves and dogs are pack animals, tactile, relying on company and touch. One does not need to have the interpersonal skills of a Sophie Devareaux to recognize a person punishing himself, someone who never reaches for his daemon for comfort not because he never needs it but because he does not believe he deserves it.

So when Sophie sees Boudicca pressing herself as close as possible to Eliot, and Eliot leaning subtly into her strength, while both look anywhere at all but at the other, she knows immediately that something is deeply wrong.

“Tell them what you did, Eliot,” Hardison hisses. “You risked _our life_.” Sophie has seen Leia annoyed and afraid, but she has never before seen the raccoon look so dangerous, nearly feral in her anger.

“We’re in,” Eliot says. “Moreau’s gonna give me the details of the auction tomorrow.”

“You?” Sophie asks, seizing immediately on the obvious discrepancy. “Why’s he going to give it to you—”

“I said _we’re in_,” the hitter snaps, as tense as she’s ever seen him. “Just make the plan.”

“Eliot worked for Moreau back in the day,” Hardison accuses, and Leia adds viciously, “_A lot_.”

Next to her, Sophie feels Nate’s shock, and the stillness that means Brigid is catching a new scent, preparing for the hunt, the leashed viciousness of which she has always known he is capable. The dragonfly flies out of Parker’s hair, staring at the hitter as though they have never seen him before. Mel ruffles her wings for a moment, then flies to the closest branch. Sophie knows without asking that she will keep watch, make sure this unfortunately public interrogation attracts no undue attention.

As for herself, her first clear thought alongside the stab of betrayal is,_ Ah, that explains it_. This is the puzzle piece they have been missing. Somewhere in this history with Moreau is the explanation for all the odd moments they’d noticed in the last months, for Eliot’s alienation from his daemon, for why Eliot is who he is.

“Tell,” Hardison orders, and sinks onto the bench next to Parker as though he cannot handle standing next to Eliot for one second longer.

“We’ve been chasing Moreau for six months and you didn’t tell us,” Nate says. Someone else might think that his tone is mild, casual, but someone else is an idiot who did not notice the growl deep in Brigid’s throat. Eliot, Sophie notes, is no idiot.

“Because,” Eliot begins.

“Because why?” Nate interrupts, intense. Boudicca flinches back and Sophie remembers suddenly that, once upon a time, bloodhounds had been used to _hunt_ wolves. The two men speak over each other, tension growing.

“I was trying to figure out a way around this, maybe take my shot—”

“Because you were protecting him—”

Boudicca snarls, “We were protecting you.” Her eyes dart around the team. Eliot’s shoulders slump as he looks down at his soul, like she has exposed a deep secret. Boudicca ignores him, staring at Nate.

Eliot swallows. “Last time we checked, that was our job.”

Nate sighs. “Look, we can handle Moreau.”

“We’re out of our league, Nate. Every one of Moreau’s men has innocent blood on their hands. Every one of them,” and here his voice breaks, and Boudicca looks smaller than Sophie has ever seen her, even when playing harmless dog on a con, “Every one of ‘em are worse than me. You think you know what I’ve done? The worst thing I ever did in my entire life, I did for Damien Moreau. And I— we’ll never be clean of that.”

“What did you do?” Parker’s voice is steady, but her hands tremble, and her daemon bobs in the air next to her.

“Don’t ask us that, Parker,” Boudicca says, and this time her voice is hoarse, nearly a whimper. She shrinks back, like a puppy expecting to be kicked, and a suspicion darkens Sophie’s mind. There are only so many crimes that make a daemon ashamed. Eliot turns to look at Parker, and Sophie finds herself devastated by the pain in his eyes.

“If you ask us, we’re gonna tell you,” Eliot says, voice breaking. “So please… don’t ask.”

Deliberately, without looking at Eliot, Boudicca lowers herself to the ground and bares her throat to Brigid. Eliot turns back to Nate and holds his eyes, refusing to even glance towards his daemon’s vulnerability. Sophie looks at her fragile, precious family, and makes a choice.

“Look, we all have a past,” she says, thinking of warehouses in London, and Paris, and Istanbul, and New York. She wonders for a moment how many people she has left behind with that knife in their gut, the betrayal she accepts now as her due. “You don’t have to tell us anything, Eliot. But we’ve learned the hard way, we’ve got to be straight with each other.”

Parker nods, and Hardison reaches for the tablet, but it is not until Brigid lowers her head to gently nudge Boudicca up that Sophie knows it is going to be alright.


	3. Parker and also Parker, on the bridge and train

Parker relishes the sunshine on their wings and wind in their hair as they stand on the bridge next to Hardison. In a few minutes (two minutes, forty seven seconds), the train will come and they’ll leap to steal a bomb from the evil king, but for now the sunshine is so pleasant. They grin at Hardison, who looks far less excited.

“Can you teach me to pick locks?” It isn’t Hardison’s usual voice, but the higher pitch of the raccoon-shape. _Leia, not Hardison_, they remind themself. The distinction is important to normal people, who are always so insistent on the division between themselves as though they weren’t _one_. And Hardison is the normalist person they know. Except Maggie, maybe. But Maggie isn’t here, and Hardison is.

Hardison, who stares at himself (at Leia) with as much surprise as Parker feels. The raccoon holds out her front paws. “I was so _useless_,” she says. “What’s the point of having _hands_ if I can’t use them when it matters? Typing is great and all but we were _drowning_ and I couldn’t get him loose.”

Parker’s thorax quivers, glinting golden in the sun. They don’t want to think of water closing over them, forcing them apart. The deceptively delicate wings that take them soaring around the world would prove a liability if the human-shape sank.

Next to them, human-Hardison does that thing with his face like whenever Parker talks about their childhood or when a client starts blaming themselves for being stupid and getting into trouble. “Leia, baby, you saved us,” he babbles, like his soul hadn’t been in the same pool he had. “You brought me air, bought us enough time till Eliot got us the key.”

“But it almost wasn’t _enough_, Alec,” Leia wails. “You started turning blue. I thought we were dead, I really did.”

Hardison cuddles the raccoon into his arms and strokes her fur. “It’s okay, baby, we made it, we’re alive,” he whispers.

“Yes,” Parker says. Both heads turn towards them, another confusing redundancy. _They_ are carefully keeping one set of eyes looking for the train (one minute, fifteen seconds, if it is on schedule) while using the other to watch their friend.

“Yes, we’re alive?” Hardison asks.

“Yes, I’ll teach you to pick locks,” Parker clarifies. “We’ll start with regular Smith-Wesson handcuffs, those are the most common ones that police officers use, and work our way through the fancier ones. And we can practice with zip-ties, too, your teeth should be strong enough to get through those. We can even practice underwater, though we should get Eliot to help with that, since we don’t swim.”

They are staring again. They’d done that a lot, ever since they’d first met on top of the Pearson building. At first Parker had thought it was the same stare they always got, whenever they forgot one of those unwritten rules everyone else seemed to know and spoke with the wrong mouth or jumped off a balcony because that was less scary than flirting. Eventually they’d realized that Hardison didn’t stare at them like they were _wrong_, he stared at them like they stared at the ocean, like something _amazing_ and _powerful_ and _terrifying_, but the good kind of terrifying, like you might get swept away but it would be glorious anyway.

“...Thanks,” Hardison says. Leia reaches out a paw, but not like she’s trying to touch without asking, just enough to let them know that she’d like to and the option is open if they want to take it. They decide they do and glide towards her, settling lightly on the raccoon-shape’s fur. It is soft, and slightly ticklish.

“Thirty seconds,” they say.

“What?” Hardison asks, clueless again.

“Twenty-five seconds, get ready.”

Leia climbs into Hardison’s backpack, and the dragonfly-shape flies back to tuck themself safely under their human-shape’s shirt. For a regular jump, they wouldn’t bother with that-- flying with both shapes is their favorite thing. But trains generate their own wind, and even the strongest insect would get flown off course by the powerful rush of air. They aren’t going to take that risk, not today.

They land together, Parker and Hardison, on top of the sun-warmed metal. Running along the top of the train is delightful, like skimming along the surface of a pond.

It’s only a matter of moments to get the skylight open, and even faster to knock out the useless guards, their boring dog daemons collapsing blearily next to them. Parker has already dismissed the guards from their to-do list before they’ve finished falling. There are more important things to focus on, mainly what on earth they’re going to do with this bomb that’s much too difficult to steal without a lot more supplies and prep than they have right now.

They’re trying to calculate what stuff in the train car they could use to create a rig strong enough to lift a bomb without setting it off when Hardison speaks.

“Parker, that access panel, can you get it open?”

“You got an idea?” They’re already pulling out the necessary tools.

“Yeah.” Leia’s pulled herself out of the backpack, twitching all over.

“Am I gonna hate it?” Parker asks. It’s mostly a joke. Parker only hates Hardison’s plans when they have to do with grifting, and there’s none of that here.

“Nah, but I am,” Hardison says. As Parker breaks open the panel with human fingers and dragonfly eyes, they think about what it means that this man is next to them, doing things he hates all day long, things that terrify him, things he’s doing anyway because he cares, about the courage it takes to be so afraid all the time and leave home anyway. It makes them feel like they’re resting in the sunshine on a pile of money.

“What are you doing?” they ask.

Hardison gestures as he speaks. “Yasmin’s battery is one-of-a-kind,” he explains. “If I do this right, I’ll overload the batteries, they’ll explode, and this thing is worthless.”

“And.... if you do it wrong?”

“The bomb triggers a giant EMP pulse, Washington D.C. is fried, thousands will die, and we’ll go down as the biggest terrorists in American history, but we’ll be dead too, so it’s not really our problem.” On his shoulder, Leia chitters wordlessly.

“Well. There is that,” Parker says.

“There is that,” Hardison agrees. Even Parker can see that he is terrified, but he cuts wires with the same quick assurance they use on a safe. “Now I just need an electric charge to overload the batteries,” he says.

“Your taser!” Leia yelps. Parker hands it over immediately, and Hardison triggers it.

Then they’re running, all of them, and Parker’s breathless, and Hardison’s panting next to them, and they feel the searing heat behind them, and suddenly they’ve run out of train to run through so they just cling to the back. The bomb explodes and keeps exploding and the fire is beautiful and they are alive and no one is dead except maybe those two guards who really had it coming working for Moreau anyway and now their train car is coming to a stop. There is Sophie pulling up in the car, and she’s telling them to come on.

Parker looks at Hardison and Leia, who are patting each other down like they can’t believe they’re all there. Hardison and Leia, who will fidget and twitch and complain but when it’s important, they’ll be patient forever. They look at them with both sets of eyes and they decide it’s time for some courage of their own.

“Hey, you know what I’m in the mood for?”

“What?” Hardison asks.

They taste joy on their tongue bubbling up like a stolen sip of Hardison’s orange soda or a bite of Eliot’s special desserts, the ones he makes sweeter than he likes but still pretends aren't for them. They say with both voices, “Pretzels!”

They skip over to join Sophie in the car. Through the dragonfly eyes everyone always underestimates, Parker sees Hardison and Leia turn to each other, and how Hardison’s face flashes through what they’re _pretty sure_ is shock and joy and maybe pride, like the way his face looks when he’s done a computer thing he was only pretending to be confident about but wasn’t actually sure he could hack. They don’t know what all of his expressions mean yet, or the nuances of Leia’s posture, but there will be time to learn.


	4. Nate and Brigid, in the warehouse

The first time Nathan Ford learned of Eliot Spencer, he had been on the trail of a stolen emerald and diamond necklace that IYS had insured for thirty thousand dollars. He’d interviewed battered security officers, who had only scattered impressions of a man who’d knocked them out like a whirlwind. The necklace had been stolen during transit, between the vault and the armored truck. It hadn’t taken long to conclude that the thief had inside knowledge of the plans, and from there Nate traced it easily to the owner’s sister, who had insisted for years that their grandmother promised to leave it to her. Spencer was long in the wind, but the necklace was recovered, which was all IYS cared about.

Nate was left with only a few facts for his records:

  1. The thief had a wolf daemon of some kind.
  2. He was both efficient and remarkably precise in his use of violence.
  3. He was smart.

The second time Nate Ford chased Eliot Spencer, he was following reports of a man with a large dog who had charmed his way through a dozen ballerinas, fought five security guards with enough grace that the dancers were already working on a new piece inspired by it by the time Nate arrived to conduct interviews, and disappeared into the night with a pair of ballet shoes belonging to Anna Pavlova. It was a job that would have been easier with a team— a distraction, a fighter, and a thief— yet no evidence of collaboration was found, and it seemed Spencer had played all three roles.

From this, Nate learned that the thief spoke Russian and English fluently, that he was both charming and attractive, and that he worked alone.

Nowhere on the list of facts Nate and Brigid have been assembling about Eliot Spencer is anything to suggest a history with Damien Moreau.

“Are you more upset because he worked for Moreau or because you’d never known or guessed?” Brigid had asked earlier, while Eliot was with Chapman pretending to kill a traitorous general. Nate hadn’t bothered answering. He has tried to lie to himself in these last years— about his goals, about his drinking, about what kind of a person he was—but Brigid never lets him get away with it for long. It is hard to lie to yourself with your soul solid beside you, though alcohol does make it marginally easier.

Now, two men and two canine daemons approach the address Chapman has given Eliot. With Hardison in his ear discovering the missing bomb and Eliot filling him on the info from Chapman, it takes Nate a minute to understand what the daemons have already realized.

“Something’s wrong,” both daemons say together, noses twitching.

“Why would you hold an auction in a warehouse?” Eliot asks rhetorically, but Brigid has already caught a scent.

“This way, Nate,” she calls urgently, tugging at their bond. Nate hurries forward, compelled both by the ever-present urge to know and the inexplicable tether keeping him close to his daemon. After turning the corner, he discovers another reason to hurry— the Italian, unconscious, bound to a chair, spider daemon on the floor by her foot.

“Goddammit,” Brigid says. “Her again.”

Boudicca’s ears flick back. “It’s worse than that,” she says, and then all four of them hear the unmistakable creak of the warehouse door sliding shut behind them.

Nate flashes suddenly back to that first job, the empty warehouse and Dubenich’s bomb that had forged four loners into a team. Would this be the bomb that would succeed where Dubenich had failed? Damien Moreau is several orders of magnitude more dangerous than a greedy airplane executive, and for a moment he wishes he had listened to Eliot and left this job alone.

But Nate knows there was a reason his soul is a bloodhound. Once he catches a scent, he _hates_ to give up his quarry . One way or another, they’ll see this job to the end. He will have to trust Hardison to track down the bomb. Right now, he has an irritatingly attractive Italian to interrogate. And rescue.

“Nate, we gotta go,” Eliot says urgently, interrupting his banter with the Italian.

She scoops up her daemon with one hand and lets Nate help her up with the other, but it is too late. Brigid stares intently towards the moving shadows and sniffs the air. “There’s at least a dozen of them,” she says.

“Fourteen,” Boudicca corrects. “Most of them were at the pool yesterday.”

Eliot grabs the phone before Nate has even noticed it ringing. “Moreau,” he says harshly. Nate can’t hear Moreau’s side of the conversation, but Brigid can and she growls. _Later_, she tells him. Beside them, Boudicca has gone still.

“Trouble?” Nate asks.

“Oh, yeah,” Eliot rasps. Boudicca bares her teeth silently and exchanges a look with Eliot, flicking her ears to the left.

Nate and the Italian follow Eliot through the warehouse. Brigid barks almost silently, and that is Nate’s only warning before Eliot grabs a man and smoothly snaps his neck, his daemon vanishing into Dust before Nate can even see what form it had taken.

This is what he hates most about hospitals, more than the smell or the cold air or the constant announcements— the way everything glitters with the remains of Dust that never quite disappears. Nate banishes the thought fiercely, before it can turn into a memory.

“We just have to get to that door,” he says.

“That’s a kill box. There’s too much space between here and there.”

Nate glances around helplessly. He can’t bluff his way out of this one. None of his usual back-up plans will work.

But someone else already has an idea.

“Are you sure you can actually take down Moreau?” a female voice asks, and it is only because he’s heard her more in the last day than in the last two years put together that Nate instantly recognizes it as Boudicca.

The spider says, “Absolutely,” and her person nods in agreement.

Boudicca looks at the gun, sitting in a pile of Dust, and then at Eliot. Eliot looks at Boudicca, then at the gun, then back at Boudicca. There is a conversation happening that Nate doesn’t understand. Nate hates not understanding, but part of him (probably the part sitting dog-shaped beside him) fears that this particular interchange could break his heart.

Eliot crouches down, hand floating above the gun, and looks his daemon in the eye. “I swore to you, Bud,” he rasps. “I swore. Never again.”

“And you were ready to go back on that yesterday,” she says tartly.

Eliot reaches out a trembling hand to stroke her ear, a gesture Nate knows intimately from his relationship with Brigid but has never once seen from Eliot before. “I wasn’t wrong, was I,” he whispers.

Her ears droop.

“Two promises I made you, Bud. You want me to break both of ‘em now?”

“Three,” she corrects. “Break two to keep the third.” She touches her nose to his. “It’s time, El.”

Eliot closes his eyes and pulls his hand away from his daemon as though it hurts to let go. He picks up the gun and stands up, shedding his jacket.

“Eliot—” Nate begins, though he isn’t sure what he could possibly say.

“Get ‘em out of here,” the hitter orders, and begins firing.

They race to safety, gunshots blasting behind them, but it is only once they reach safety that Nate understands Eliot’s final demand and the persistent distress coming from his daemon. He looks around to take stock, make sure no one has been hit. There are Italian and her spider, both fine. There is Brigid, beside him.

And there is Boudicca, beside her.

“You’re Separated?!” Nate blurts.

“_Obviously_,” Boudicca snarls, glancing back towards the warehouse.

For a moment, Nate is furious all over again, at Eliot for not telling him this, at himself for never realizing it. A bite at his ankle brings him back to earth.

“Now is _really_ not the time, Nate,” Brigid tells him firmly. She lowers her nose to the ground. “We’ve got a bad guy to catch up with. You’ve got a job to do.”

Nate nods. He turns to the Italian. “Can your daemon hide?” he asks. “Three daemons and two people will attract a lot of dangerous attention.”

She purses her lips and nods. The spider salutes Nate ironically with two legs before nestling smugly into her cleavage. Nate shudders and isn’t sure if it’s with fear or arousal. Brigid yips at him again. She’s never liked the Italian.

“To the airport, then,” Nate says, and steals a car.

As he drives, Nate compulsively checks his rearview mirror to look at Boudicca in the back seat. As long as she is still there, somewhere, Eliot is still breathing. For a moment, listening to explosions through his earbud without knowing whether they are coming from the train or the warehouse, he catches himself wishing that Leia and the dragonfly were there too, so he could know they were all okay. He winces a moment later, rejecting the thought. Separation is not a pleasant business.

When Hardison’s voice comes on the coms telling them where to go, when Parker chimes in to apologize for not being able to steal the bomb, Nate breathes a silent prayer of thanks.

They find the airport, and the Italian has credentials that get them through security, but as they reach the hangar, Boudicca stops.

“Moreau is through there,” she announces.

“Good,” Brigid snarls viciously.

“This is as far as I go,” Boudicca says firmly. Everyone stares at her for a second, ignoring the twinge of _wrongness_ surrounding an unaccompanied daemon.

“End of your tether?” Nate suggests, testing.

Boudicca looks at him and flicks her ears back, turning to Brigid instead.

“His daemon’s name is Fortuna,” the wolfdog says quickly. “She’s a Bengal tiger. She’ll probably think you’re too small to bother with, but don’t get within twenty feet of her anyway, she can leap pretty far and she likes pouncing on her prey. Don’t stare at her or do anything else to express dominance, but don’t do anything submissive either. Not that you would. Just… be careful.”

“You’re really not coming?” Brigid asks.

Boudicca shifts uneasily. “I can’t protect you from him,” she says. She glances over towards the Italian and lowers her voice. “I can’t protect _me_ from him.”

Brigid barks in mixed surprise and anger. She has clearly understood something from the wolfdog’s statement that Nate has missed. He hates missing things, and this seems to be a day full of that.

“I walk in there alone, I give Damien Moreau the power to control Eliot Spencer. And that is something I will not do.” She growls, deep in her throat, and even with all his experience of canine noises, Nate cannot tell if it is a sound of fear or of anger. “_Never again_.”

Nate tries to assimilate this new information, to guess at what it implies, but all he can think of is the pain in their voices in the park when they’d begged Parker not to ask, about Eliot in a warehouse behind them sacrificing his hard-won principles to take down Damien Moreau.

Boudicca has moved on already, calling the Italian over. “Eliot’s coming,” she says. “Following the bond straight towards us. But you can’t wait for him, I can hear the plane’s engine starting up. Go! Stop Moreau!” She looks directly at Nate. “Take him down,” she orders. “Make this worth it.”

Nate thinks again of the look on Eliot’s face as he picked up the gun, of the way his fingers had lingered in Boudicca’s fur.

“We will,” he vows. And they would.

But it wouldn’t happen today, and Nate will be ashamed.


	5. Eliot and Boudicca, at home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains some references to past violence and a brief description of past suicidal ideation.

Afterwards— after San Lorenzo, after they leave Damien Moreau locked in a cell where he can never, _ever_, get his hands on them again, after he’s caught up with General Flores and his Harris’s hawk daemon, after they charter a flight home to avoid anyone seeing Sophie— Eliot goes straight to his bathroom. He finds the special scissors he uses to trim his hair and sets up the mirrors just how he likes them.

(There are a lot of mirrors in Eliot’s apartment. He doesn’t like looking at himself much, but it’s worth it for the lack of blind spots.)

He takes a shower, scrubbing the grime of a transatlantic flight off his skin and wishing the grime on his conscience were as easy to scrub off. He lingers over washing his hair, keeping one eye on the security feed in the corner. After toweling off, he sits in front of the mirrors and picks up the scissors, and that’s when Boudicca speaks to him for the first time since he left her in the warehouse.

(Or, well, technically she left him, but Eliot’s not going to quibble over semantics. They’d left each other, maybe, and isn’t that the problem right there.)

“That’s really not necessary,” she says.

He puts down the scissors and looks at her. She’s pushed the bathroom door open and is sitting just outside it, all hundred-plus pounds of her, licking her front paw in the way she only does when she is extremely focused on something else.

“Felt like a change,” he says.

She snorts. “Haven’t we lied to each other enough?” she asks. It’s meant to be a joke, meant to be light-hearted, but it sits between them like a grenade, and for a moment they both hold their breath to see if it will detonate.

Eliot takes the hit, feels it bruise, refuses to let it bounce back onto Boudicca. She watches him warily.

“You like the long hair,” she says. “You like how it feels in the wind, and how it keeps old enemies from recognizing you, and you like—” here her tone changes, like she’s less confident in what she’s saying, like he might laugh at her if she’s wrong, “you like how— how it feels like my fur.”

He blinks at her. It shouldn’t surprise him that she’s guessed that, but it does. Aside from that brief touch in the warehouse, it’s been _so long_ since he’s touched her, since he’s let himself take comfort in her fur. He knows he doesn’t deserve that, not since he allowed Moreau to sink his fingers into her pelt and didn’t even protest, but he’d thought this pale imitation was allowable.

“Am I wrong, El?” she asked gently, the old nickname dropping cautiously from her lips like she’s not sure she has a right to it anymore.

“You know you’re not.”

“Are you cutting your hair because _he_ said he liked it long?”

He doesn’t answer, doesn’t need to.

She sighs, and her whole body droops. “You don’t gotta let him take this from you. He’s taken—” her tail twitches— “he’s taken enough from you already. From us. You don’t hafta give them this, too.”

(For Boudicca, it is _them_ as often as it is _him_. It had been the tiger who had captured her the first time, who’d released her only for the pleasure of capturing her again, and it had been Moreau who had rendered Eliot helpless with his hands twisted in her fur.)

He picks up the scissors.

“Eliot,” she says, and now she’s talking to the floor. Pleading, maybe, and he can’t understand why his proud daemon would choose this hill to beg on. “Please don’t cut your hair, Eliot. I know you don’t want to touch me anymore, not since he touched me. You wouldn’t have done those things if they hadn’t captured me, if I’d been stronger, faster. I know you can’t get comfort from me when it was all my fault, but God, Eliot, let yourself take comfort _somewhere_.”

Eliot puts down the scissors carefully, because even heartbroken, Eliot Spencer is never careless with a blade. He slides off the stool to sit next to her on the ground. She goes still, and he knows this is how she looks when evaluating a surprise, when she’s deciding if something is a threat or not. It’s almost funny, how he thought his heart was already too shattered to break again, but she keeps proving him wrong.

“Boudicca,” he says helplessly. “Bud. We were killers long before Damien Moreau.”

She knows this. She keeps watching him, frozen.

He runs his hands through his hair and doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry because she’s right, it’s a comforting gesture, and he was about to let Damien Moreau, who has taken everything else from him, take that too.

(Well. Maybe not everything. His soul is still right there, the white of her muzzle sharp against the shadows.)

He tries again. “It wasn’t your fault, Bud. I’m the one who insisted we Separate.”

“We made that decision together, don’t you even try with me,” she snaps. “_I’m_ what made you vulnerable, what let them control you.”

“I let them hurt you!” he yells back. “I stood there and watched them play with you like they were training a puppy and all I said was_ yes, sir_ because at least I knew what to do with orders.” He hunches his shoulders. “I stopped touching you because I didn’t think you’d want anyone to touch you after that, especially not me, when it was all my fault.”

She’s staring at him like he’s a stranger. “You don’t… you don’t blame me?”

“I blame _me_.”

“Well, I always blamed me,” she says, baffled.

He reaches out a hand. She takes his wrist between her jaws, so gently he can hardly feel the scrape of her teeth. They’ve never spoken about it, but this is how he’d wanted to go once, with her bite tender as a kiss letting their life out between them. Now he knows how he’ll go, with his body between the team and danger, and he won’t let anything keep him from that duty.

She lets him go and he sinks his hands into her fur, softer than sleep. It’s like having a gourmet dinner after years of nothing but MREs. She presses herself against him and he feels more than hears the rumble of her laughter.

“We’re such idiots,” she says. “Suffering in noble silence, blaming ourselves, so sure we knew what was going on that we never bothered _talking_ about it.”

“You know what Hardison would say?” he asks. She stiffens, and he remembers too late that they betrayed Hardison’s trust, that they might never get that back. He swallows. “Hardison would say that we’re arrogant idiots taking all the blame for ourselves and leaving none of it for Moreau, who’s the one who actually did it.”

She whuffs in his ear. “And Parker wouldn’t understand how we could possibly misunderstand each other for so long, when we’re the same person.”

He chuckles and scratches that spot behind her ear he knows she can never reach properly to scratch herself. “I missed you,” he says. It’s a harder admission than he expected it to be.

“Never again,” she says, “Promise me, Eliot, we won’t be apart again. And maybe we can try to talk to each other more?”

“I promise,” he says, and means it. “Just because we can Separate doesn’t mean we should. Never again, not unless it’s necessary to save the team. Or a child.” She nods, accepting the exceptions as obvious.

He takes a deep breath. “In the theme of better communication,” he begins, and stops.

“This won’t fix everything?” she suggests.

He nods. “I still… we ain't good people, Boudicca. We’ve done a lot of terrible things.” He knows what she looks like with blood on her muzzle and dripping from her teeth. She knows what he looks like covered in the shimmering Dust that is all daemons leave behind when they die.

“I know,” she says. “Eliot, I know. We’ll never be clean of that.”

Eliot thinks of a teenager with an heirloom tin lunch pail learning to use the scoop. He thinks of a gym in Nebraska. He thinks about a singer in Memphis, and a pack of wannabe fascists in the woods of Western Massachusetts.

“Nothing we do will change what we’ve done,” he says. “But I’m glad we’re doing it.”

She licks his face like they’re children and they both laugh. Eliot thinks that nothing will ever be okay, but they are alive, and they are together, and they have a team worth dying for and a mission worth living for, and maybe for now, that’s enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! 
> 
> Hardison- Leia, a North American Raccoon. Raccoons are highly adaptable and intelligent. They have extremely dexterous paws, which Leia uses to type on a modified computer. She can also use a video game controller pretty effectively. 
> 
> Eliot- Boudicca, a Wolfdog. This was inspired by Blind_Author's work , https://archiveofourown.org/works/465527, in which John Watson's wolfdog daemon symbolizes, among other things, the duality and paradox of a doctor who is also a soldier. I thought it was a fitting paradox for a hitter who loves feeding people. The key difference between the two is that John in that story is proud of his daemon and his choices and Eliot is...not. 
> 
> Sophie- Melpomene, a Northern Mockingbird. I got the association of Sophie/mockingbird from Poetry's work, https://archiveofourown.org/works/7022662. Mockingbirds are intelligent and capable of differentiating between individual humans, particularly recognizing people who have been intruders or threats in the past. They remember their breeding spots and return to areas where they had success in the past. And, of course, mockingbirds are known for their skilled mimicry of other birds. 
> 
> Nate- Brigid, a Bloodhound. Bloodhounds have extraordinarily keen olfactory senses and a tenacious tracking instinct. They are used around the world for tracking missing people and criminals. 
> 
> Parker- Also Parker, a Globe Skimmer Dragonfly. Dragonflies have extraordinary eyesight and are fast, agile, flyers and hunters. Globe skimmers have the largest range of any species of dragonfly, and have one of the farthest known migrations of any insect. They can fly for hours without perching, as well as flying higher than any other species of dragonfly. They are gold in color. 
> 
> Moreau- Fortuna, a Bengal Tiger. Tigers are one of the largest wild cats in the world. Unlike lions, who live in prides, tigers are largely solitary. They are vicious hunters, preferring large prey, and have been known to eat humans. They are associated with royalty. 
> 
> Chapman- unnamed, a Black-Backed Jackal. Jackals are indiscriminate eaters and will attack whatever is available to eat, including insects, reptiles, and a variety of mammals. They take down prey much larger than themselves by going for the legs, loins, and throat. They are highly territorial and known for aggressively defending their pack. 
> 
> General Flores- unnamed, a Harris's Hawk. Harris's Hawks are the only known raptor that routinely hunt cooperatively.


End file.
